Bitcoin transactions are verified by the work of software run by other people using the currency, a process that takes on average 10 minutes and can be much longer, an hour in the case of many exchange sites. Lee says that hinders operators of online stores from using the currency. “With Bitcoin, sometimes merchants are forced to accept unconfirmed transactions because confirmations are way too slow,” he says. “Faster confirmations lead to a more useful currency.” Litecoin transactions are confirmed on average every 2.5 minutes, which Litecoin’s developers say is more practical for businesses.
As player numbers crater, EA will shut SimCity Social, other Facebook games
Similarly, The Sims Social rocketed to over 65 million monthly players just after its launch in 2011, only to drop to just over five million monthly players today, according to AppData. SimCity Social seems to have peaked at 10 million monthly players and has managed to hold on to just over one million of them less than a year after its launch.
via As player numbers crater, EA will shut SimCity Social, other Facebook games | Ars Technica.
Windows: It’s over
Perhaps most of our computing will move to the cloud, but you know what device we’ll still be using for most of our interactions? It will be a PC, simply because it’s easier to enter data with a real keyboard than any other interface.
Open vSwitch
Open vSwitch is a production quality, multilayer virtual switch licensed under the open source Apache 2.0 license. It is designed to enable massive network automation through programmatic extension, while still supporting standard management interfaces and protocols (e.g. NetFlow, sFlow, SPAN, RSPAN, CLI, LACP, 802.1ag). In addition, it is designed to support distribution across multiple physical servers similar to VMware’s vNetwork distributed vswitch or Cisco’s Nexus 1000V. See the full feature list here
via Open vSwitch.
Xen to Become Linux Foundation Collaborative Project
The Xen Project is an open source virtualization platform licensed under the GPLv2 with a similar governance structure to the Linux kernel. Designed from the start for cloud computing, the project has more than a decade of development and is being used by more than 10 million users. As the project experiences contributions from an increasingly diverse group of companies, it is looking to The Linux Foundation to be a neutral forum for providing guidance and facilitating a collaborative network.
via Xen to Become Linux Foundation Collaborative Project | The Linux Foundation.
Red Hat Announces RDO And OpenStack Partner Program
Installation is made easy with the Red Hat-developed installation tool, PackStack.
That last bit is interesting. OpenStack is a complex suite of tools, and the installation process is non-trivial. Any work to streamline that will reduce at least one barrier to success.
As for the name, RDO? It stands for “Red Hat Distribution of OpenStack.
via Red Hat Announces RDO And OpenStack Partner Program | TechCrunch.
Hopefully this works with CentOS as well.
Rackspace goes on offense against second patent troll in two weeks
Rackspace is being sued over its Rackspace Cloud Notes app for iOS, in a lawsuit that also includes claims again several other Texas companies, including Petroleum Geo-Services, PlainsCapital Bank, Texas Instruments, Schlumberger Technologies, and energy giant TXU. All of those companies have iOS apps which, apparently, rotate their screens.
via Rackspace goes on offense against second patent troll in two weeks | Ars Technica.
Ddrescue
GNU ddrescue is a data recovery tool. It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors
via Ddrescue – GNU Project – Free Software Foundation (FSF).
Texting on Tablets Takes Off
By moving SMS from the device to the cloud without the need for a phone client, the device becomes irrelevant, and consumers are given much more flexibility to communicate wherever and however they please.
via Innovation Generation – Sarah Reedy – Got the Message: Texting on Tablets Takes Off.
Back in the day this used to be called instant messaging.
Global WordPress Brute Force Flood
As I type these words, there is an on-going and highly-distributed, global attack on WordPress installations across virtually every web host in existence. This attack is well organized and again very, very distributed; we have seen over 90,000 IP addresses involved in this attack.
via Global WordPress Brute Force Flood | HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing.
This wordpress blog has been receiving these attacks since around the beginning of the year. Getting rid of the admin account is a first step and using strong passwords is a second, I chose to just shut down access from the Internet entirely by disabling the wp-admin directory and wp-login.php access in httpd.conf. That may not be practical for most sites however. The error logs were getting quiet in the last 3 or 4 weeks and then this week they’re back up to full speed blocking with IPs from ranges all over the place. It looks like I’m not the only one experiencing this according to here and here.
Update: From my observations of the logs over these last few months these bots are hitting the sites very patiently, sometimes once an hour thus running under the radar of the security plug ins I tried.
Update II: More links here, here, and from here:
These rules will block access for the offending IP address for 5 minutes upon 10 failed login attempts over a 3 minute duration.
This won’t work. Each IP from these bots may hit you once or twice an hour so any limit login plugin won’t detect them at any rate to ban them. You can’t stop this on an IP basis. Since my logs last rotated Sunday morning (almost 6 days ago) I have had 500 different IP addresses hit wp-login.php. They all have been given 403 Forbidden responses yet they keep coming.